Tag: 1921

Immigration policies of 1921 depict a government using legislation to design a population. New immigration laws were created to control the flow of immigrants into the United States according to ethnic and education classes. Laws of 1917 were to weed out undesirable classes of immigrants that had certain mental and physical health problems as well as prevent poor people from entering the U.S. In 1907 the country slammed the door on the Japanese. 1888 was the year the Chinese were rejected. 1875 established that America’s home-grown hookers were acceptable but Chinese hookers were not. Does the dear reader see a pattern emerging or is the gringa guilty of paranoid conspiracy theory syndrome?

1921 was just more of the same as far as America’s national racist agenda. If the country had not yet been clear enough that only upper class white immigrants were the preferred class of immigrants, legislators decided to pass one more Act just to make sure the rest of the world heard us loud and clear. The first thing they did was place limits on the number of people that could immigrate. True to form, our nation’s bureaucrats adopted a complicated formula of basing immigration numbers to three percent of the number of foreign born people, designated by ethnicity, according to the 1910 census. In other words, all counted immigrants would be classified by country of birth, then tallied to come up with totals of how many immigrants of each nationality were present in the U.S. This total would be used to determine the three percent who would be allowed in for the year. For example, if there were 100 German immigrants on the 1910 census, only three new German immigrants would be allowed entry. In 1921, America added controls and limits on European immigration to their dirty laundry list of discriminatory acts.

The wording of the legislation seemed to be an honest attempt to sound unbiased and fair since it’s all based on the numbers, right? WRONG! Have my dear readers not learned anything since I’ve been blogging about all this immigration mess from the beginning of the nation’s origin? Haven’t we discovered along this journey that every immigration law passed in the United States has thus far been motivated by greed and racism? Has it not been revealed that American bureaucrats are master propagandists determined to convince the world of the humanitarian spirit of the nation when the real truth is that the U.S. is a nation designed to be a capitalist utopia? Why in the world, then, would anyone be fool enough to think that suddenly, in 1921, immigration laws would be passed that would actually be fair and show no preference for one ethnicity over another?

First of all, the act provided exceptions for immigrants who were artists, performing artists, professionals, or religious leaders. These types of people were always acceptable no matter what their skin color or language barrier. With regard to how the details were actually applied and worked out, a thorough study of the end result numbers makes it clear that masters of deception were at work skewing the numbers in favor of certain ethnicities. When you get right down to the nitty gritty, bottom line, immigration figures actually reflect that the Act had little impact on the number of immigrants allowed into the country who originated from northern and western Europe. There were no limitations placed on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. It was the “other” people that Americans were worried about.

This Act was right on the heels of the close of World War I. After the first Great War, practically all of Europe wanted to start over in the New World. Americans were afraid of the country being flooded with undesirable classes of people. This racist pressure motivated U.S. lawmakers to use this seemingly “fair” legislation to discriminate in order to prevent an influx of immigrants who would not properly assimilate into white American culture. Preferred ethnicities originated in western and northern Europe. Southern and eastern Europe were home to the “undesirables” such as the Polish, Greeks and Italians.

Ethnicity and culture was not the only consideration America had on their minds. At this time the United States didn’t need to import cheap labor any longer because the country now enjoyed a steady supply via Canada and Mexico. The nation didn’t want new working class people showing up and possibly causing a drop in wages for the existing working class. When immigration law was actually applied, professionals enjoyed fewer restrictions while working class people found it harder to gain entry to the country.

As I read through the Act, the word “eugenics” kept popping up in my mind. Although limited by a lack of technology in 1921, the spirit and philosophy of eugenics was alive and well in U.S. politics. If eugenics endeavors to improve humans by controlling reproduction in order to weed out undesirable inherited characteristics, America sought to do this through immigration control. That was the spirit of 1921 America. Has the white majority really advanced much further in its social tolerance of today? To be on the safe side, this poor, working class, epileptic gringa chooses to stay where such prejudice doesn’t exist, in the warm, accepting arms of la gente de mi barrio.